Postfeminist Discourse in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Warner’s Indigo

Book excerpt: A scrupulous study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and its most comprehensive rewriting Indigo, or Mapping the Waters by Marina Warner. Taking as its focus representations of femininity and the other, the study scrutinises the various implications of three concepts: ambivalence, liminality and plurality in terms of their relevance to the conjunctures of postfeminism and post-colonialism, proposing that postfeminist discourse is in search of a new ethics and perspective that mainly champion these three terms through the employment of intertextuality as a strategy. The study is careful to carry out a comparative analysis of the works in terms of both poetics and politics. Informed by interdisciplinarity, the study explores how The Tempest destabilises itself, inviting a deconstructionist reading in terms of its relation to patriarchal and colonial dynamics ingrained in the play and how Indigo takes its substantial space among other rewritings of The Tempest by presenting new and imaginative ways of seeing the female and feminised figures in the play.